Beauty Memories: Extreme Nose Contouring, Remember This?

May 25, 2010

Last week, me and Mr Candy decided to make some tapes (VHS for you spring chickens) for Candy Grandad, who hasn’t quite entered the DVD generation.

As a result we ended up going through our own childhood tape collections, and I found an old recording of a Chinese Variety show by TVB (the biggest TV channel in Hong Kong). I used to watch this thing all the time as a kid, its kind of the way I picked up Cantonese!

Not everyone may get this reference but I think a lot of 80s kids with an Asian background may!

Remember extreme nose contouring?

Back in the day, people didn’t want cosmetic surgery, but they wanted smaller noses so the answer was dark brown powder shaded right up to the eye. Hilarious!

There is a reference to this in Shaolin Soccer, a Stephen Chow film (Stephen Chow is hilarious, and looks like a Chinese George Lamb I think:

If you want a laugh watch Kung Fu Hustle - its subtitled, you do not need to understand Chinese to find it funny!).

Anyway, in Shaolin Soccer, an ugly duckling gets an 80s style make over and ends up with this:

Think that’s a bit extreme?

Well with many thanks to modern technology, I have a real 80s pic:

I love the way it joins up to her brows.

More pics:

Slight less dark but the idea is there. Why were the 80s so utterly hideous? I don’t look back at the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50, 60s, 70s with such disdain!

One more:

You’ve got to love how a trend becomes so common that we can no longer see how extreme or how hideous it is. For example, remember poker straight flat lifeless hair from a few years back because we discovered GHD’s?

I reckon in a few years we’ll wonder how we let people get so damn orange without telling them they look like oompa loompas. You have been warned.